Who Makes Singers Great?

Because our understanding of mass art is conditioned by the methods
and terminology of the movies, "record producer" is an unfortunate
title. "Record director" would be better, for just as films are
identified with their directors, so the theoretical responsibility for
an LP--with all the sophistication of form, content and technique that
has come to imply over the past few years--falls to its producer. The
artistic success of three recent releases from Warner Brothers--Norman
Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky (Reprise 6365), Lorraine
Ellison's Stay With Me (Warner Brothers 1821) and Ella
Fitzgerald's Ella (Reprise 6354)--is due primarily to sensitive
direction from three producers each of whom deserves more credit than
small type on the back of the jacket. Respectively, they are Erik
Jacobsen, Jerry Ragovoy and Richard Perry.

It's not surprising that each of these conspicuous examples of the
producer's craft is a collaboration with a single artist. Rock groups,
even when dominated by one or two individuals, create as a whole, and
in a way that tends to exclude the producer. In rehearsal, songs shape
themselves around the talents and limitations of each musician; they
change again when performed before an audience. By the time a working
group reaches the studio, most of its conceptualizing is done, and the
producer is left with the all-important but hard-to-notice
details. Even his control over sound--the clarity and tone of the
recording itself--is shared with his engineer. He may be an auteur, if
that's what you're into, but he writes exceedingly fine.

This is not to say that an assertive producer such as Felix
Pappalardi can't affect the recorded sound of a strong group (Cream)
and overpower a mediocre one (Kensington Market). But his voice can be
heard more clearly in conjunction with a single artist. If the artist
is a songwriter he can be counted on to perform alone when he performs
at all; if he is a performer, especially on the club or soul circuits,
he is likely to depend on a standard show of familiar material which
he does not plan to record. In each case, the producer must take the
place of the group, by hiring musicians, thinking up arrangements,
selecting and even writing material, and offering general
counsel. Note: by the time Felix Pappalardi was through producing
guitarist-vocalist Leslie West, West was touring as the star of a
group called Mountain, and his bassist was Felix Pappalardi.

In a less headlong way, Erik Jacobsen functions as Norman
Greenbaum's group. Greenbaum, who as a leader of Dr. West's Medicine
Show and Junk Band made a hit of "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago" three
years ago, is a wryly talented but somewhat insubstantial
songwriter-vocalist who would be buried by one of the pipsqueak
Tschikovskys (Artie Kornfeld) or Ellingtons (Al Kooper) who produce so
many nondescript records. But Jacobsen, who used to work with the
Lovin' Spoonful, collaborated for three months of rehearsal and
recording with Greenbaum in order to come up with just the right
reinforcement.

On the surface, Greenbaum's songs seem very dissimilar. But "Junior
Cadillac" (about the neighborhood bad guy) and "Tars of India" (advice
to nascent rock stars) and "Alice Bodine" (about a long-departed
girlfriend) and "Spirit in the Sky" ("I've got a friend in Jesus") do
share Greenbaum's oblique, affectionate vantage. Jacobsen has managed
to set each song individually--ersatz r&b for "Junior Cadillac,"
parody wah-wah for "Tars of India"--in the context of an overall sound
that embodies Greenbaum's vantage. Like that of the good-timey
Spoonful, this music rocks energetically but never takes its own
kineticism too seriously. It is the music which makes the album work,
and it is as much Jacobsen's as Greenbaum's.

Jerry Ragovoy's contribution to Stay With Me is even more
telling. Ragovoy is a 39-year-old veteran of r&b who in recent
years has produced Howard Tate and Carl Hall. His work is admired by
soul connoisseurs of both races, and his reputation among hip white
fans of black music is so firm that Paul Butterfield chose him to
produce the Butterfield Band's latest album. But because Ragovoy likes
to experiment with some of soul's more extreme usages, and because the
labels he works with often lack the connections to sell even
first-rate soul singles, he has had only moderate commercial
success.

Lorraine Ellison is a gospel-based singer reminiscent of Aretha
Franklin who on her first album was cast by Ragovoy--succumbing to the
advice of others--in a Nancy Wilson soul-going-pop mold, which is
where Aretha herself was stuck for five years before moving to
Atlantic Records and producer Jerry Wexler. She did cut loose for one
song, however, a hard-wailing ballad called "Stay With Me" which
became an instant underground classic in Harlem. That was where
Ragovoy really wanted her to be, anyway, and so the second album
included "Stay With Me" and went on from there: nine of its eleven
cuts were heartfelt explorations of the persistence of pain.

Its one failure is a certain evenness of tone--Ragovoy resorts too
often to slow-tempo songs and orchestra (as opposed to band)
arrangements--but in its own excellent mode it is a triumph. Ragovoy
plans a third album which will cut back on the strings and allow his
singer to break her rich voice into something fast and funky. When he
does, the team of Franklin and Wexler is going to have some
competition.

Ella, on the other hand, fulfills its own promise. It would
not seem much of an accomplishment to get a great album from the most
fluent jazz vocalist of all time, but in fact Miss Fitzgerald has not
even recorded for several years, and all of her previous attempts at
contemporary material ("Can't Buy Me Love," for instance) have been
embarrassments. The problem is simple. Contemporary music is
rock-based and requires a direct, physical approach to singing, while
Ella's forte has always been flights of melodic and rhythmic
improvisation. The task of producer Richard Perry, then, was simply to
persuade her to sing straight and forget the
doobie-doobie-doobie--that's fine for Johnny Mercer, but it's not for
Nilsson and Smokey Robinson.

Such transformations are a specialty of the 27-year-old Perry, a
graduate of the University of Michigan and Kama Sutra studios who has
extracted unlikely albums from talents as diverse as Tiny Tim, Fats
Domino and Theodore Bikel. But this one wasn't easy. Recording in
London in the midst of a European concert tour, Perry got ten vocal
tracks down in four days, and every one represented a compromise
between his limited expertise and the habitual inclinations of a
genius. Most of the instrumental tracks had to be recorded in Los
Angeles, but Perry did get a lot of help from the great rock pianist,
Nicky Hopkins, who set the proper tone with his usual robust,
no-nonsense chordings. Pro that she is, Miss Fitzgerald learned to
approximate this tone herself. In terms of sheer strength she has
never sounded better.

The edge of the album, however, is in the material Perry selected,
ranging from an unbelievable bang-bang version of "Knock on Wood" to a
campy rendition of Randy Newman's maybe-anti-war song "The Yellow
Man." Ella does scat for one chorus of Bacharach-David's "I'll Never
Fall in Love Again," but mostly she just belts, and it's
beautiful. Her voice has slipped just slightly, but it's still the
best around, and every trill she allows herself works. It's the
long-awaited union of a great singer and a great music, a treasure,
and it would never have happened if it weren't for Richard Perry.